The Coffee Wanker's Guide

Lovely cup of Joe

This is a guide to the perfect cup of coffee.

Introduction:

The world of humans may, for convenience, be sorted into two categories: people who like coffee and people who do not. If, in conversation, someone with no reason to joke or lie should tell you that they don’t like coffee then, assuming there is no medical issue to take into account, stop listening to them immediately, they have nothing of worth to say. Tell them so if you feel politeness dictates, but let that be your last interaction with them. Turn your back. Walk away if necessary. Not everyone who professes not to like coffee is a post-hipster sociopath, avoiding societal norms for attention seeking reasons, but it’s not worth taking the chance. In any case you may be certain they will be treading some cold, lonely path through a bleak land whose stamp you don’t want in your passport. Abide by this one simple rule and you will be as sure as you can be that you’re sticking with the right people. Good people. Coffee people.

All normal, functioning people enjoy a cup of coffee. The only real question to ask yourself concerns the level at which you intend to participate. Where are you, if you will, at with your coffee drinking? Are you content to hoover in 1970s style freeze dried caffeine of uncertain origin, with no conscious discretion, like a wild animal rolling in filth for the scent? Or do you aspire to the highest echelons of the coffee drinking pyramid, the top drawer of truly appreciative sophisticates?

Have you ever seen someone looking at a chain coffee shop wearing an expression that suggests they can see human faeces smeared on the window? If so, and your first thought was “I wish I knew how to love coffee that much!” then the following guide to the best cup of coffee is for you.

Water Selection

You may hear the view expressed that the water used in making coffee is a matter of personal taste, or worse, that it makes no difference at all. You should realise at this point that you are listening to an idiot, with no more right to an opinion on these matters than a talking farm animal. They may as well opine that it doesn’t matter where along the track sprinters should distribute themselves at the beginning of a race. The water is the pedestal on which everything else must stand. Every reaction affecting taste that takes place before the mouth does so in your chosen water, which must be absolutely pure. There must be no chemistry occurring extraneous to that directly concerning the components of the coffee bean, otherwise anything could happen. Don’t be tempted to make do with ordinary distilled water which, make no mistake, still contains trace levels of chemicals and particles of broken up bacteria and viruses, you may as well use sewage.

Molecular grade water may be bought from any local supplier of scientific reagents, or alternatively you can make your own from scratch by burning two volumes of pure, filtered hydrogen with one volume of pure, filtered oxygen. There is some risk associated with this procedure so take care to read the packaging. Also, to avoid contamination at ignition, don’t use a chemical flame or spark, use curved Murano glass to focus clear sunlight.

Finally, it’s a matter of taste but personally I like to double  boil the water before the start of the coffee making process; I find this really brings out the neutrality of the flavour.

Bean Selection

Beans

There is a great deal of hoo-hah in the coffee drinking world with regard to the relative significance of the many different coffees available and indeed they’re certainly worth trying, but if you will take my advice you’ll ignore the bandwagon-Billies who won’t touch a hot drink unless it’s been through the digestive tract of this or that jungle vermin. Just tell them “No one drinks my coffee before me” and leave it at that.

Serious people know that all arguments were settled long ago and the true king of coffee is Monsoon Malabar. That said, most of what’s available these days is the mass produced stuff where the growers achieve the all important monsooning by means of raking the beans around a South Indian warehouse with no windows, in the rain. It’s worth paying a little extra to get the beans that have actually been sailed around the Cape Of Good Hope in monsoon season in the hold of an East Indiaman. Obviously these are quite seasonal and can be hard to get at the best of times, but it’s worth it to get that appreciative nod from the people that matter around the dinner table. Coffee people.

Roasting and Grinding

You’ll know your own roaster and its quirks, but aim to roast 90s - 2mins past the second crack, two days before consumption. This allows the interior of the bean to be properly rested. No one wants to be drinking coffee from unrested beans.

Many arguments have been had over whether to hand or power grind coffee, but to be absolutely honest it doesn’t really matter as long as you have an efficient, in-process particle measurement/distribution system in place. The old sieving methods for this stage aren’t really up to scratch as there is no way of holding back finer material than the sieve grade, making particle surface area to volume ratios unpredictable. These days a laser diffraction particle size analyser is the gold standard. Aim for an espresso particle size of 0.20mm with as small error bars as your equipment will allow.

Brewing and Drinking

Home Barocycler

There are many available routes to an acceptably well brewed cup of coffee, each with its associated pros and cons. The simplest are the pour over filter cones, the equivalent, more or less of sticking your snout in a coffee trough and rooting for caffeine. Similarly, percolators and filter machines that just make “some coffee” are enough to satisfy the less sophisticated, “rougher” end of the palette spectrum belonging to, say, garage mechanics or hospital consultants. As preferences become more nuanced, more controllable methods are preferred: the french press, the aeropress, vacuum pots and siphons. For myself however, having taken the trouble to assemble the finest ingredients possible, ultra high-pressure cycling is the only way forward, specifically between ambient and 45000psi. While any barocycler will do the job, make sure yours has temperature control.

(As an aside, I’ve also found that it’s not worth skimping on regular servicing with these machines).

Thus, 20-30 cycles, to taste, at 95’C and out pops (again, sometimes with some force if the seals aren’t properly maintained) a perfect, piping hot cup of coffee.

Some people, such as babies or humanities types may prefer to add milk and/or sugar at this point but they are, of course, mistaken. These are people who want to be seen to be coffee drinkers, to be associated with the “cool” that the lifestyle necessarily projects, but would actually rather be drinking sugary breast milk or even a “flavoured tea”. If, on occasion, you do find any of these sorts of people present in a coffee drinking session and for some social reason are unable to ignore them or eject them from the premises, then keep a jar of simple, freeze dried supermarket coffee handy. They won’t know the difference and it will stop them wastefully parasitizing your efforts.

On a final note

Of course, coffee won’t be legal forever. While it is available it should be prepared properly and appreciated by the right sort of people. Serious people. Coffee people. Our people.

AA

Diplocks Yard

 Standing at the cliff edge on the path of economic entropy

It is in the nature of our society that everything is for sale, everything has its price. Through its life a thing may be bought and sold many times, its value depending to some extent on its perceived innate worth, derived for instance from other, comparable transactions but also on the skill of the seller and the degree of desire in the buyer. This value occasionally increases with time, but more usually the reverse is true; most things decay in some way, becoming less useful or perhaps even just less attractive to the eye. Human relationships may be viewed from a similar standpoint, the currency being (usually) different, but the concept of value that it represents remains the same.

It follows that, given enough time, everything and everyone, will reach the end of their useful life, when they are no longer wanted and their value reaches zero. It is at this point as a

society we tend to demonstrate a lack of sentiment, as we remove the things (or people) in question from our existence. They are eventually (depending on circumstance) buried in landfill to trouble archaeologists, or incinerated to trouble climatologists, or just deleted from our address books lest they trouble our consciences. There are places though on the event horizon of this eventual fate, last chance saloons right on the transition point of doom where jetsam might just be fished out before it becomes economic flotsam if just the right eyes fall on it at just the right time. In East Sussex, this is Diplocks Yard.

When a thing has drained through every level of Sussex consumerism, passed through every grade of mercantile filter, the cogs of commerce turning just a fraction of a radian more each time, until there is not a drop more profit or utility to be wrung fom it, then Diplocks yard is where it will wait a while, on a trestle table, or in a broken cabinet for final judgement. Perhaps one more person will need a remote control for a cathode ray Sony Trinitron and perhaps this is the day he (probably he) will wander in. In all probability though, this is the penultimate resting place for the truly unwanted, the genuinely worthless. I don’t know if there is a geographic human equivalent. Hastings, possibly.

If you do find yourself in the belly of Brighton, strung out on single origin coffee or brought low on micro-brewery beer, if there’s nothing left in the tank and the rest of the day will be rolling along without you, then make your way to Diplocks and as an object in the universe you will find your kin. Not that there was much in the tank to begin with for most of this - one must be optimistic - merchandise. Nothing here was ever destined to be an heirloom, this was everyday ephemera, not built to last. You will find no antiques. There are books here that will never again be looked at, piled near yellowed pictures that will never find another wall or ones that, given their content, surprise you that they ever did.

This seems a hopeless place, from the weathering of a wine rack that could only have occurred in a skip or woodpile to the mounted boars heads that only a madman could love, there is little here that even makes so interesting a corpse as to engender the desire to know its story. Who cares what

optimistically misjudged hand picked out these chintz lampshades all those years ago, or what sartorial agonies of indecision were played out before those bland coffins of wardrobes, the wood stained dark to hide, well, the wood.

And yet, Diplocks prevails. Those plastic clocks without faces, cheap,

homeless chessmen, dead men’s suits and awful crockery have regularly seen off challenges from men in suits sporting shoes with little chains who would much rather the few yards of painted wood frontage on North Road was taken away (presumably to stand in a similar yard somewhere) and replaced with glass behind whose gleaming darkness business people would sit and wonder (times being what they are for businesses) why their services remain unused, like a bamboo magazine holder that no one wants.

But then, perhaps I’m hasty with the word hopeless: That wine rack? Worth three quid of anyone’s money and now it's in my kitchen. Who knows, perhaps there’s always hope given enough time and a bit of luck.

AA

How I Came To Terms With The Tyranny Of The Weekend: A Lazy Man's Perspective.

Au contraire...

It’s raining outside, and I'm glad. It’s that deciduous summer rain peculiar to Britain, thrown casually from passing clouds which could care less for the feelings of holidaymakers. You’ll have heard it pounding the roof of your tent or caravan, or seen it streaming down the window of the seafront café or amusement arcade. If you’re eleven years old it’s bank holiday ruining weather, trapping you indoors and stealing the fag-end of the summer holiday. If you’re a chap in your forties however, maybe feeling a bit lazy, sitting on your arse and all you need to make you the happiest of men is a film in any genre where you might find David Niven, then the rain is excellent news, it means no one can reasonably expect you to set foot past the front door. I’m not talking chronic laziness you understand, of the Channel 4 documentary “Fetch mama’s stick” type, just an acute 48 hour attack of velcro buttock.

There are dark forces working against you if it refuses to rain on a

Would David Niven have attended Zumba?

weekend such as this. An unwritten British rule that sunshine must not be wasted. To do so feels like a minor sin, as though you’re giving away a little bit of your soul. You have to find something, anything to do outside, no matter if you want to or not. It’s a tyranny.

A similar tyranny is the feeling nagging at the back of your mind that you might not have done enough. You might not have put enough effort in to satisfy the inevitable post hoc discussion when you get back to work. “What did you get up to at the weekend?” is rapidly becoming one of the most intimidating questions a man like myself of simple, quiet tastes can face. A thrill runs through me as of cold war East Berlin and the demand of “Papers!”

I’m usually taken more by surprise by the question than I should be. Initially my mind goes blank and I imagine I look confused, startled. I can’t remember what I did. The pause stretches. The polite smile on the questioner’s face starts to look brittle as they begin to wonder if they are talking to an imbecile. “Why is he so reluctant?” they’re thinking, “is he covering something up? A murder, maybe, perhaps this Ukraine business is his fault.” Eventually I do remember, but then is it enough? Do I lead an interesting enough life to satisfy this person? Have they had a more interesting time than me and if so does this mean they have in some way “won”? There is the other side of the coin to consider, as well. What if I've had too interesting a weekend? What if I flew to Rome for lunch, or spent my time racing cars against high class call girls? Should I make some self-deprecating joke about it in case I’m judged harshly as a try-too-hard?

In all likelihood I won’t have done these things. Most of my weekends sound pretty pedestrian in these conversations as is the case, I suspect, with the majority of people who have exceeded their vodka and clubbing years. This, in fact, is my issue. I considered doing more exciting things in order to spice up these Monday morning exchanges, but realised in time that I would be rolling over and submitting to oppression by a minority. I chose instead a path of honest, passive resistance. These days I answer truthfully and with pride. “I read a book on marketing psychology,” I say, my expression adding: “No, no reason, I thought it might be interesting”. Sometimes I might say “I was out with friends,” and I hope my open, honest smile conveys the rest of the message, to the effect of: “we talked about interesting stuff and laughed our arses off, without feeling the need to do so whilst water skiing or learning to play Ghanaian death drums in a community centre”.

I like to flatter myself I’m not completely boring, but I also think I have the right to the occasional dull weekend without the tacit implication that I’m wasting my life. I’m not wasting it, I’m doing stuff I like, which might just be drinking tea and watching an entire run of an American cop show, or learning all the internet has to offer on the formation of metals in collapsing suns (did you know all the iron in the universe is formed in a particular twenty second window in the life of a star?) or even just spending some time with

A "fat bike" for when
just cycling somewhere
isn't enough.

my friends, perhaps in a restaurant that isn’t owned by a TV chef.

I realise of course that all this is (probably) all in my head and just my personal paranoia. When it comes down to it, it’s a trivial opener, designed to say one of two things, either:

Hello. I’d like to converse with you for no other reason than to enjoy a few moments of greeting, as we’re a social species and it’s the sort of thing we do. I have no particular information to pass to you and no need of anything specific from you. I have nothing prepared so I’ll just slot this in to give us a bit of thinking time while the chat gets going.

Or alternatively:

Hello, I hate you. I’ve always hated you. For me, you’re one of the downsides of turning up here every day, but since this isn’t the last day of working here for either of us I feel telling you would bring these issues to the surface, creating needless bad feeling which we would then have to live with until one of us resigns or works out a way of murdering the other without getting caught. Further, I might, God forbid, need something from you at some point and the worse these situations are, the more degrading it will be for me to get on my knees and beg.

Either way, I suppose it’s just a useful cliché, a harmless little mental shortcut we can trot out and play our parts in while we settle more comfortably into the exchange. It could always be the case of course that the questioner genuinely cares and is honestly interested to find out just which of my riveting pastimes I may have been engaged in.

If this weekend tyranny is, at least in part, coming from my own head, I should think about what I’m trying to tell myself. Perhaps I am dull. I might be so boring that I’m embarrassed to tell myself and have to project my opinion onto others in the hope that I take my hint and liven myself up. Maybe I do want to do stuff that I don’t want to do. I suppose I have to consider the possibility that I’m over thinking the issue.

Lastly, on the subject of perspective, to anyone who may unaccountably be reading this in a refugee camp, or a bombed out school far from my armchair and is politely thinking “Yes, I can see how these problems would bring you such great suffering, tell me again about the clean water you use to make tea”, I can only apologise.

                                     
                                                                                                                            AA

On seeing a terrible street puppeteer in the Brighton Festival.

In the geographical centre of the festival, a less than competent puppeteer grinned, ever more ingratiatingly as one by one his little crowd melted away, each finding their own small but decisive disappointment. Oddly perhaps, people were less concerned with his flagrant lack of talent than with particular small incongruities that added up to an air of falseness. No one took any particular note of the random flailing of the puppet itself, which was a shame as under the brown varnish danced a particularly fine, vintage marionette. Their attention never made it past the young man on the other end of the strings where, not consciously perhaps, they sensed the bohemian affectation, a Brightonista veneer, more fartsy than artsy. His hair was a little too estate agent neat; his junk shop, loud check suit a shade too contrived; his beard fell more into the hipster camp than the artist. People can take a bad puppeteer, that might be funny, but when it's just a man with a puppet demanding attention from adults it's insulting. No one likes being deceived.

                                     AA

Unicycling in Brighton

Some nights ago I had the funniest dream I've ever had. Sean Connery was in it, I have no idea why, or why it occurs to me now, drinking an average coffee in a bar on the 7 dials, one of Brighton's shabbily desirable areas. Brighton's shabby desirability is what has attracted so many more people here than there were twenty years ago when I first knew the place.

The narrative of a city is like the narrative of one's life; everything was always better before, everything has gone downhill, oh you should have seen it then, and so on. This is a false perception of course, the reality is that what we invested good time in getting used to gets dismantled and taken away, replaced with the new which we have no time for. The young people I see walking past the door here in the rain, they know these are their good old days, it's written on their faces, but do they know how much they won't like what's to come? Only the shallow will survive the world of tomorrow with their sanity and values intact. Beware of those who move too easily with the times, they had too little of themselves invested in the first place.

Everyone cycles in Brighton now, but you don't see as many people unicycling as you used to. I like unicyclists, you always knew you were having a good day when you saw one, and that they were coming from or going to some madness or other. There's still madness around, but it's not like it used to be, everyone's trying too hard. The really eccentric people, the ones who were out to amuse themselves, were priced out long ago. The few lucky ones got famous, others moved away or became addicted to something to fill the void. It's important to note here that a stable life can be maintained while filling any two of the preceding conditions, but never all three.

In my dream I was out with friends, I forget who, and we were with Sean Connery, I forget where. Those of

us who weren't Sean Connery were playing a game where we were trying to get him to say the word “bond” in conversation. Whenever he did we would break out into the James Bond theme. He was getting really annoyed. I forget how the dream ended but I woke up laughing.

The rain does to a city what it does to the personal narrative, the memories. Rain takes away the sunshine illusion and shows up what's wrong with the place, the leaks and cracks in the buildings that never got fixed, the dirt in the gutters. The only people you see on the streets when it's raining are the ones who need to be out, or have nowhere else to go. Not many people will walk in the rain with you, treasure those that do.